


Starlight in the Gloom

by Phoenixstrike



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Eventual HEA, Explicit Sexual Content, Harry abandoning the wizarding world, M/M, mild Ron bashing (sort of)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-01-17 05:25:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1375432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenixstrike/pseuds/Phoenixstrike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after receiving constant and relentless hounding from the Press, a huge fall-out with his best friend, and a catastrophe of a marriage which blew up in spectacular fashion forced Harry to quit the wizarding world for good, he's about to find the life he's created for himself in the Muggle world irrevocably changed after one fateful night in the hospital in which he now works. But is it a change for the better?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Black Holes and Revelations

**Author's Note:**

> _Harry Potter and all its indicia are © JK Rowling, Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books, Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros. I own none of the copyright, and this fanfiction makes no money_  
>  **Pairings:** Harry/Draco, Hermione/OMC  
>  **Warnings:** Possible Ron bashing if you squint, depending on your view  
>  **A/N:** This will be a novella-length story. The title of the story comes from the Muse song _Sing for Absolution_. All the chapter titles are lyrics from other Muse songs. Chapter one is from _Starlight_. There's something about Muse's lyrics that is perfect for Drarry. I hope you enjoy the story.
> 
> *

“There. Done.” 

Harry finishes securing the dressing to the newly-stitched gash on the inebriated man’s forehead, then pulls off his latex gloves and throws them into the clinical waste bin, before ushering the patient out of the examination room. It has been an extremely long night, and triage, as was usual for a Saturday night, has been full of injured drunks and junkies, with wounds not serious enough to merit quick attention by the medical team, but loud and annoying enough for Harry to wish they’d all just sod off home. If he never has to smell stale alcohol on someone’s breath ever again, it will be too soon. He glances at the clock and heaves a sigh of relief; it is six in the morning now. Only one hour to go. He discharges his patient with a lecture about the dangers of excessive drinking, then calls his next patient into the treatment room: one of only about three non-substance-related admissions he’s dealt with all night. It is an elderly lady who had got up to use the loo in the night and tripped and hurt her ankle. Harry quickly establishes the joint isn’t broken, and sets to work making it comfortable for her. 

By the time he’s finished strapping the elderly lady’s ankle and asked the registrar to write a prescription for Tramadol for her, it is seven in the morning and the day team arrives. Harry and the rest of the night shift hand over to the day team, then with a collective almost-gasp of relief they pull off their dirty scrubs, throw them into their rucksacks and pull on clean clothing, and head for the exit in record time, pleased that it is a whole twelve hours before they have to see the place again. Harry fully intends to spend the majority of that time sleeping. 

He makes a show of walking to the car park with the others, then waits until his colleagues are all busy or have driven away before dashing out of sight, pulling his wand discreetly from his own rucksack and Disapparating. Harry usually does drive to work, but the morning after the night shift leaves him in no mood for cars. He’s exhausted, and dirty, and hungry, and he just wants to get home as quickly as possible. He arrives in the alley at the side of his house, walks to this front door, wearily pulls his key from the pocket of his coat, unlocks his door, and all but slams it shut behind him, before collapsing into a chair in his living room. Merlin, he is tired. Knowing he should just go to bed, but feeling like he needs a few minutes to unwind first (otherwise all he does is work and sleep when he’s on nights), he picks up the remote for the TV which is lying next to him and turns it on. 

_BBC Breakfast_ blares onto the HD screen, and the female presenter is reviewing the front pages of the Sunday newspapers, most of which are talking about some scandal in which a famous Hollywood actress has left her husband to live with another woman. Harry knows about this of course. It had been a popular topic of conversation during his break the previous night. He tries to focus on the news headlines, but it is no good; he feels his eyelids drooping and the words begin to make no sense in his sleepy brain. This has been Harry’s fifth night shift in a row, and Saturday nights are always the second most heinous of all shifts in the Accident and Emergency department at the Royal Sussex County Hospital where Harry works as a senior staff nurse, thanks to the amount of people coming in with alcohol and drug-related emergencies and injuries. The only shift worse, in Harry’s opinion, is the night shift on New Year’s Eve- a shift he always volunteers to work (along with Christmas Day), because it isn’t as if he gets to spend it with people he loves anyway. 

Harry knows he’s fighting a losing battle against sleep, but he’s a stubborn bastard if nothing else, and he tries valiantly to remain awake, pretending to be interested in yesterday’s Premiership football results. But sleep ultimately wins out, and Harry drifts off on the sofa. 

When he awakes a couple of hours later, the living room is full of bright sunlight, and _Songs of Praise_ is on the telly. Harry watches the congregation singing ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ for a couple of seconds before grabbing the TV remote and putting the telly on standby. Then he realises what has woken him up- there is a large seagull screeching right outside the window; a frequent peril of living so close to the sea. He yells a curse at the seagull, but it doesn’t budge. Instead it perches on the windowsill and shoots him a look of utter audacity. Harry flips it the finger, which achieves absolutely nothing except making him feel slightly better. Once awake, Harry realises he’s fallen asleep with his left arm underneath him, which is now completely numb. Braving himself for the inevitable pins and needles that will be following soon, he extracts the floppy limb which feels strangely unattached to him from underneath his stomach, and lets out a grimace as oxygen-rich blood flows back into the limb reawakening it from its slumber, bringing with it dagger-like fiery bursts of pain stabbing him unrelentingly.

“Ow,” he says with a grimace, heaving himself up from the sofa and padding down the corridor of his Brighton ground floor flat to the bedroom. Once there he strips off his jeans and T-shirt, pulls on a pair of ratty pyjamas that are lying on top of his pillow, and climbs into bed. He doesn’t stir until his alarm goes off again at six that evening. When it beeps, ostentatiously and persistently, Harry yells a string of expletives at it before hauling himself out of bed and into the bathroom, where he showers quickly before dressing in a clean set of scrubs, and heading to his kitchen to make ‘breakfast’. He fries some bacon in the pan and makes himself a sandwich, which he eats quickly before grabbing his keys and rucksack, then he dashes out of the house, and Apparates back to the hospital. Merlin, his life had become mundane. This certainly wasn’t how he had seen himself, years ago, when he had imagined his future life as an adult. For one thing, he never thought he would be living as a Muggle ever again. 

When Harry had entered the wizarding world at the age of eleven, he couldn’t imagine himself ever wanting to leave it. Here was a place that, for the first time in his life that he could remember, he had found himself with friends, people he thought of as family, and people who actually gave a damn what happened to him. Of course, there were those who had hated him with a passion- Voldemort being top of that list- but for the most part, Harry had felt accepted in the world, and in return couldn’t fathom ever wanting to live away from it again. 

Then it had all rather spectacularly turned to shit around him. His marriage- the result of a whirlwind romance that swept him off his feet during his “eighth” year at Hogwarts- crumbled around him within eighteen months of saying ‘I do’, and the Press hounded him day and night and refused to allow him any sort of privacy at all (this was one of the contributing factors to his marriage breakdown), resulting in him finally snapping one time and hexing a reporter so badly they ended up in St Mungo’s and Harry was thrown out of Auror training as a result. He had been lucky to avoid criminal charges. 

He could have lived with all that, however, had it not been for the monumental fall-out he and Ron had, four years after the Battle of Hogwarts. It hadn’t been any one thing which had ended their friendship, but a series of events that had caused them both to bubble away until they eventually both blew up at each other. First had been Harry’s jealousy of Ron’s continued Auror training, which he had failed to hide properly. Then there had been Ron’s complete lack of support throughout Harry’s brief and disastrous marriage, and undisguised glee when it all went tits up. But the straw that broke the Hippogriff’s back had been when Harry sided with Hermione when hers and Ron’s relationship ended, just three months before they were due to be married. Harry had- literally- caught Ron with his trousers down, shagging Lavender Brown over the kitchen table of the small cottage he and Hermione shared. He had told Hermione about it (after much agonising) and she had called off the engagement, and, indeed, their relationship. Ron had been furious, believing that Harry’s loyalty should have been to him, and he should have kept quiet. Harry had pointed out that both Ron and Hermione were equally important to him, and that it was unfair of Ron to expect Harry to keep such a secret from Hermione when she was the innocent party in this. Ron then accused Harry of deliberately sabotaging his relationship because his own marriage had been an unmitigated disaster, just like Ron had told him it would be. The pair had fought, there had been very unkind words (not to mention hexes) exchanged on both parts, and Harry, having taken about as much as he could take, had walked out of both Ron’s life and the wizarding world with a huge ‘fuck you’ to both, having not returned in nearly twelve years. He didn’t so much as read the _Daily Prophet_ any longer. 

Harry had headed for the south coast, wanting a fresh start by the sea. He enrolled in a local college and sat A Levels, reasonably assuming that NEWTs in subjects such as Defence Against the Dark Arts and Potions wasn’t going to stand him in very good stead in the Muggle world. To his surprise he did very well in them, and with the support and guidance of the only person he was still in contact with from his old life, Hermione, he enrolled on a degree in Nursing at the University of Brighton. After completing the three years of training there in 2006 he took a job as staff nurse on the A and E ward and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Harry doesn’t know why he is thinking about his old life tonight, and he frowns as he shoves his rucksack into his locker. He checks the roster for the evening, and this instantly draws him out of his maudlin mood- he’s not working in Minor Injuries this evening. He’s going to be working in Resus. Good, no time for moping in there. He pins his name badge and ID to his uniform, attaches the small fob watch to the front of his scrubs, and heads into the hustle and bustle of the hospital, ready to receive handover from the day team and start his twelve hour shift. Thank goodness he’s got the next three days off, he thinks. 

Harry is so rushed off his feet that the first six hours whip by. He sees two heart attacks, a stroke victim (who sadly dies- Harry still cannot stand to lose patients, even after nearly eight years in the job), and some idiot high on marijuana who tombstoned off Brighton Pier at low tide and suffers severe neck and spinal cord injuries. By one in the morning he’s hot, thirsty, and in desperate need of a break. Thankfully he gets one soon after this, and he and his friend Emily head up to the staff canteen together, on a quest for strong coffee and chocolate cake. 

“You take the biggest slice,” Emily says, pushing a china saucer containing a slice of chocolate fudge cake towards Harry from the tray she’s carrying. “It looks like you need it.”

“Have I told you recently I love you?” Harry replies with a smile, picking up his fork and spearing a large chunk of the cake onto it and popping it into his mouth. It’s slightly stale and rather dry; the icing has dried out somewhat, but it’s rich and full of sugar and gives Harry a much-needed energy boost. He groans in satisfaction and licks the icing off his fork. Emily laughs. 

“What?”

“You,” she says. “I must be sleep deprived, because I’m quite sure I just found that erotic.”

“I thought you were a lesbian?”

“Like I said, Harry, sleep deprived.”

It’s Harry’s turn to laugh, but just as he’s about to tuck into another chunk of cake his bleeper goes off. There’s an emergency coming into Resus and he’s needed back in the department straight away. He looks longingly at his cake, before pushing it towards Emily, whose bleeper has not made a sound. Then, taking a final swig of coffee as he goes, he dashes to the lifts and heads back to the emergency department. 

He’s just finished scrubbing up at the sinks when the consultant and registrar catch up with him.

“Sorry to call you off your break, but we’ve got a major RTA coming in,” says the consultant. “Two male victims, and both in a critical condition. They’re being airlifted in now.”

“OK,” Harry says, all thoughts of cake gone now. He walks into the Resus room and finds two teams of medical staff fully assembled, waiting for the paramedics to bring in the casualties. He’s only waiting a couple of minutes before the first victim is rushed in towards the first team, who begin work straight away as the paramedics feed them vital information. About thirty seconds later the victim his team are working on is also rushed in. 

“Unconscious young white unidentified male,” the paramedic is saying, and Harry takes a good look at the body lying on the Resus table as he pulls on a fresh pair of latex gloves. His heart goes out to him; his face is cut and bruised beyond recognition and his head, which is inside a huge neck support, has matted blood seeping all over it. Harry instantly knows they will have a huge struggle to save this one, as the injuries are clearly severe and extensive. “Pedestrian, hit by a lorry along with another male about thirty minutes ago. BP ninety over forty-five, SATs eighty-eight percent on O2. Pulse fifty BPM. Pupils responsive to light.” She continues to hand over to the medical team, listing the known injuries the man has, and Harry’s natural instincts kick in. He grabs a pair of surgical scissors and begins to cut away the man’s clothing. 

“We need five units of O neg,” he hears the consultant saying to a junior nurse, who instantly telephones through to get the blood sent. “Harry, I need you to get a cannula into each of his arms.”

“Right.” Harry finishes cutting the sleeve of the man’s shirt and pulls away the material. Just as he has finished collecting the equipment he needs to insert the cannula into the victim’s arm, he hears a huge panicked commotion from the other bed, the unmistakeable sounds of a flat ECG, and the mechanical whirring of a defibrillator charging. He cannot allow too much worry for the other man; he has his own patient to help keep alive, so he fights to tune everyone who’s not on his own team out. He’s just finished inserting the cannula into the man’s right arm when the team next to his slow to a halt and the consultant says with a heavy heart, “I think we should stop. Does everyone agree? Time of death, two-seventeen AM. Thank you, all.”

Fuck. 

The rest of his team all pause for a nanosecond, all having heard the words. Harry can tell it just makes them even more determined to save this man, as they’re buggered if they’re going to lose two patients, two young men who should have their whole lives in front of them ahead, within minutes of each other. A senior house officer hands the cut-up clothing to a student nurse and asks them to look through the pockets.

“Try and find a wallet, a mobile phone, something that we can use to identify him and maybe find a next of kin,” she says to the student. “Harry- the cannula!”

Harry dashes around to the left hand side of the patient, prepares the equipment for cannula insertion on the trolley next to him, and turns the man’s left arm over. 

And almost drops dead himself from shock. The student nurse won’t find a scrap of identification on this man’s person, Harry knows this with as much certainty as he knows anything, but that doesn’t matter, because he knows who it is. This man has the very faint, but definitely noticeable, red outline of a skull and snake branded onto their left forearm. Harry knows without a shadow of a doubt this isn’t just any old tattoo. This patient has the fucking Dark Mark.

There were only nine people alive with the Dark Mark on their arm at the time Harry left the wizarding world, and seven of them were in Azkaban. That leaves only two people who this man could possibly be. And Harry is positive that this man on the table is not Lucius Malfoy, who would be approaching the age of sixty by now. He can taste bile rising as he realises that the man who this medical team are battling to save is Draco. Draco who is critically ill, and whose companion has just died, and was almost certainly a wizard too. 

“Harry, are you alright?” he hears someone ask him, and he notices he’s shaking violently. He’s not yet inserted the cannula. 

“I…” he stammers. No, he’s not alright. He’s not bloody alright at all. He notices the cannula being taken from him as Sophie the staff nurse takes over, inserting the needle into the crook of Draco’s left arm. He wonders if he might pass out. 

“There’s nothing in the clothing,” the student nurse says, having finished her examination. “Nothing to say who he is, or who is next of kin could be.”

Harry is now standing there uselessly, dumbly, trying to engage his stupid brain and body, but he appears to have seized up. So he offers what he can to be helpful. 

“I know who he is,” he says, and even to his ears his voice sounds full of disbelief. “His name is Draco Malfoy.”

“Are you sure, Harry?” a registrar asks him. Harry nods. “Okay then. And do you happen to know who his next of kin is?”

“Yes,” Harry replies. “It’s me. I’m his next of kin. Draco Malfoy is my husband.”


	2. Don't Give Up the Fight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The title for this chapter comes from ‘Invincible’ and from the line,_
> 
> _“Don't give up the fight, You will be alright, 'Cause there's no one like you in the universe”_
> 
> _ _

It’s ten in the morning now, and Harry is still at the hospital. His shift officially finished three hours ago, but he’s been off duty ever since he realised it was Draco who was lying critically injured in the Resus room just before half past two this morning. He’s next to Draco’s bedside now, who’s been stabilised and moved to Intensive Care where he’s now being kept in a medically-induced coma, and it’s perhaps the most surreal few hours Harry has ever spent. He’s listening now to the humming of the automatic blood pressure monitor as it inflates, then the gentle hiss as the air is expelled, and that, combined with the rhythmic _bleep, bleep, bleep_ from the ECG machine, reassures Harry that Draco, for the moment at least, is alive. Harry is utterly exhausted but he knows sleep will be impossible, so he just sits, staring at the monitors, and at Draco.

“ _Drop dead_.” That was the last thing Harry had ever said to him, as he hauled his bags out of their home- one they had lived in for such a short time together. Harry cannot now believe those last words as he looks at Draco’s face, still unrecognisable due to swelling, cuts and bruises caused by his horrendous injuries as Draco lies there fighting for his life, and he feels a stinging pressure building behind his eyes. He blinks the wetness in them away impatiently. 

He doesn’t remember phoning Hermione, but he must have done, because she’s here too, sitting next to him and holding his hand tightly. He doesn’t know how he would have survived the past few hours without her. She has given Harry’s colleagues a brief and Muggle-appropriate account of his and Draco’s marriage, saying they entered into a civil partnership a few years ago and are now estranged, but there has been no formal or legal split between them. This is mostly the truth, although Harry and Draco were married much earlier than Hermione told his colleagues (in the summer of 1999, straight after Harry’s nineteenth birthday, in fact), and theirs was a true, legal marriage, as much as any heterosexual union. Of course, Hermione had to say they were in a civil partnership as same-sex marriage is an extremely new thing in Muggle Britain, but it had been enough for his colleagues to accept that, indeed, Harry is their patient’s legal next of kin. 

“We need to tell his parents,” Harry says, and he can hear the tiredness in his words. “They need to know what’s happened. And maybe they’ll know who the other man was, too.” That poor man, the one who died, is still unidentified. Harry had a quick look at the body earlier on request from the hospital staff, but even without the horrific injuries he succumbed to, Harry didn’t think he would know him. Even if Harry did know him by name, it was over ten years since he’d seen anyone other than Hermione from his old life, and Harry doesn’t think he would recognise people he’d not been close to after that long anymore. 

“Harry, we can’t,” Hermione says, and she sounds stricken. “They’ve… they’ve… oh, Harry. Narcissa Malfoy died about two years ago, and Lucius disappeared not long afterwards. Somewhere abroad, I think. Although I’m not sure he’d come anyway. He and Draco never made it up, you know.”

Harry doesn’t know this of course. He does, however, know that Lucius and Draco had a major falling out- it would have been hard not to know this, given he was half of the reason for it- but he thought that the pair would have reconciled in the years since. The news about Draco’s mother is shocking, however. He and Narcissa hadn’t exactly got along, but she had at least not attempted to cast her own son out of the family for marrying a half-blood who could never produce a Malfoy heir. He wonders how Andromeda has taken this news, if she even knows. She and Teddy moved to Canada to live close to her husband’s family a year after Remus’ and Tonks’ deaths for a completely fresh start, and Harry has unintentionally lost contact with them both. 

“You should have told me about Narcissa,” he accuses. Hermione frowns, and purses her lips together in that way she does when she’s exasperated. 

“Harry, you told me you wanted no news whatsoever from the wizarding world. Your exact words were, I think, ‘I don’t care if Voldemort himself comes back from the dead, I want nothing more to do with any of it’.”

She’s right, of course, and Harry sighs before taking off his glasses and resting them on Draco’s mattress whilst he rubs fingers into the corner of his eyes. He looks again at the battered form of his husband, for that is what he is, regardless of the fact that they’ve not seen one another for thirteen years; their marriage had no legal dissolution, just as Hermione had told his colleagues. And that also means he’s Harry’s responsibility. 

“What about his friends?” Harry asks, and his voice sounds half-hearted even to his own ears. “Parkinson. Zabini. Daphne. Goyle. They’ll want to know he’s been hurt. Won’t they want to take care of him?”

“You know as well as I that they won’t,” Hermione says. “I’ll owl Daphne and tell her, but I doubt she’ll want to take Draco in. She and Theo Nott just had a baby. And the rest: oh, Harry, they’ve not changed one iota in the last decade, you know.”

Harry is expecting that answer, but it doesn’t make it easier to hear. Daphne, he supposes, has a very good reason for not being able to look after Draco, but as for the others? Draco’s friends are the superficial kind; fun to spend the night with, drinking and dancing until the sun comes up, but cannot be relied upon for anything. Selfish Slytherins. He and Draco had many rows about their friends; Harry hated his (with the exception of Daphne), and Draco still loathed Ron and Hermione. But what that does mean is that it’s all going to come down to Harry, yet again, to carry this burden. Assuming, of course, that Draco lives. Harry wonders vaguely if he’s in some sort of nightmare and doesn’t realise he’s actually fast asleep, and that none of this is real. 

The police informed Harry earlier that the driver of the lorry has been arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. He’s apparently maintaining that two men simply appeared out of thin air into the middle of the otherwise deserted road, which of course the Muggle police do not believe for a single second, and why would they, but it’s clear to Harry what happened, and he’s willing to bet that Draco’s wand is lying in a ditch somewhere near the accident site, having been flung from him at the moment of impact after he and his companion Apparated into the path of the oncoming vehicle. He decides to go and look for it later, if he can.

“I’m going to phone Daniel and check on the children,” Hermione says then, drawing Harry’s attention away from his thoughts. “I’ll bring you back a coffee. It looks like you could use it. Do you want anything to eat?”

She squeezes his hand softly as Harry shakes his head, then lets go, before crossing the room and exiting. 

Harry likes Daniel, Hermione’s husband of six years. He’s a Muggle, and from Sydney. Hermione met him after an extended holiday in Australia, a few months after she and Ron split up, where Hermione had escaped to just to get away from everything for a while, and to try yet again to repair the extremely fractured relationship she has with her mum and dad. Hermione’s parents were furious with her for the Memory Charm she performed on them, and didn’t speak to her for over a year after she reversed it, weeks after Voldemort’s defeat. They had stayed in Australia, refusing to return to England, and are still there now. They’re also terrified she could do something like that again to them, and they don’t trust her anymore. They’re frightened of their own daughter, and Harry suspects this is the real reason they have chosen to stay on the other size of the world, almost as far away from her as they can get. Harry knows Hermione is still devastated about this, but puts on a brave face. He supposes that marrying a Muggle was a way for her to cope; Hermione has reasons too for hating the wizarding world at times, although she is still part of it: she works in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry. Her twin girls, Amy and Ellie, are four now, and both are showing definite signs of being witches. 

Harry jumps slightly when he hears a voice next to him, and realises that the doctor has entered the room, and is monitoring Draco’s vital signs. He gives Harry a small smile but doesn’t say anything. Harry doesn’t need him to. He knows from his own experience that Draco’s injuries mean it’s still very much touch and go, and he’s been told to prepare for the worst. He knows that the next twenty-four hours are going to pretty much tell them if Draco is going to live or die and, if he does live, whether he’s suffered any permanent, life-altering injuries. Harry leans forward and strokes a lock of white-blond hair out of Draco’s swollen eye. His other hand rests lightly over the wand in his jeans pocket, which almost feels as if it is burning a hole in them.

Many times since he qualified as a nurse, Harry has fought with himself over whether or not to use his magic to heal patients who otherwise cannot be healed. And every time a patient has been lost who could maybe have been saved with a spell, he’s gone home and sobbed with guilt. 

But Harry’s held out. He made the decision to leave his old life and live effectively as a Muggle, and he can’t pick and choose which parts of that life to embrace. He’s a nurse in a Muggle A and E, not a Healer at St Mungo’s. And he’s a bloody good nurse, even without using magic.

It’s one of the reasons Harry likes Accident and Emergency medicine. The vast majority of patients he treats daily don’t have life-threatening injuries or illnesses and magic isn’t required, and for the critical cases that come into Resus, he’s working with a team and is extremely busy, meaning a sly charm would be extremely difficult to perform. He also knows that he sees many cases in Resus- like Draco’s companion this evening- for whom no amount of magic could save. That thought is a huge comfort to him during those times where a patient is lost: that he really did do everything he could to save them.

No, it’s situations like this, where Harry is alone on a quiet ward with a patient, and knows his magic could potentially save a life, that he struggles most with temptation. Even then, he’s managed to resist. But none of those patients were wizards; at least, not to his knowledge. And certainly none of them were his husband, a man he was, at one point at least, insanely in love with. 

The doctor is finished now, and leaves the room once again with a final sympathetic smile aimed in Harry’s direction. Harry returns the smile briefly, then glances at his watch, then at the door. Hermione has been gone about ten minutes now, and will be back any minute. He knows from looking at Draco’s charts, as well as discussion with the medical team, that Draco has a ruptured spleen which will have to be removed if it begins to bleed internally again, some swelling on the brain, and a spinal cord injury that could lead to permanent paralysis, in addition to the two broken legs that are currently set in plaster. Even if Draco does survive this, Harry realises, he’s going to require months of outpatient appointments to help him recover, and even then there is a good chance he’ll never recover fully. The once proud, sarcastic and vain man that Harry has loved and loathed in equal measures since he was a boy of just eleven is lying in a hospital bed, totally broken.

Harry snaps, his resolve crumbling. He and Draco may have had a fiery, and at times bad-tempered marriage, but they did love each other, and have been through too much together for Harry to see Draco resigned to a wheelchair, unable to even take himself to the toilet, or lift an arm to perform magic. Harry knows Draco would rather die than face life like that. He doesn’t know many healing charms, but he knows enough from the Auror training he had completed. Before he can talk himself out of what he supposes is probably a bad idea, Harry draws his wand and begins casting. 

He doesn’t heal everything; after all, a supposedly miraculous total recovery eight hours after he was very nearly killed would definitely raise suspicions and almost certainly damage the Statute of Secrecy. And the last thing Harry wants is to end up being arrested by Aurors. So he leaves all the superficial cuts and bruises, and doesn’t heal the broken legs or ribs; the Muggles are more than capable of healing those just fine without his help. But he casts a few subtle charms on the injuries that are critical: nothing drastic which will raise suspicion, but powerful enough to mean Draco’s life is no longer dangling perilously in the balance. He does ensure there will be no permanent paralysis: the extent of Draco’s injury- like all accident victims with a spinal cord injury and not yet stable enough for a CT scan or X-ray- is still unknown at this point, so he’s confident he can heal this without raising suspicion. Harry knows he has to be very careful here. He also knows he cannot let his heart rule his head, even though he’s aware it’s already very close to doing so. He wants to heal all the cuts marring Draco’s face, but he manages to stop himself. Harry notices his hand is trembling as he returns his wand to his jeans pocket. 

Hermione returns then, carrying two polystyrene cups filled with coffee in her hands, and a bag of cheese and onion crisps in her teeth. He indicates with a muffled plea for Harry to take the crisps, and he reaches up and extracts the packet. 

“Those are for you,” Hermione says, indicating the packet after she places a coffee next to Harry. “Eat them, Harry. You’ve been awake all night, and you’ve had a horrible shock. You need to eat something.” She looks at the bag with distaste. “Even if it is only a packet of crisps.” 

Harry opens the bag and pops one of the crisps into his mouth. For a few seconds all he can hear is the crunching of the crisps between his teeth, but then a small gasp of surprise from Hermione cuts through the relative silence. 

“Harry! What did you do to Draco? I can feel the magic coming from him in waves!”

Shit. Harry should have known Hermione would rumble him in about three seconds. 

“What?” he replies, trying- and failing- to fake innocence. Hermione gives him one of Her Looks. “He wasn’t going to make it,” he says quietly, deciding there is absolutely no point in trying to lie to Hermione. “Not without major problems, at least. And… and after everything we’ve been through together”- his mind is suddenly filled with images: those from Hogwarts when they did nothing but trade insults in their first six years, to trading heated kisses in deserted alcoves that left Harry tingling in their returning ‘eighth’ year. He remembers frenzied fucking, and gentle love-making with whispered words of adoration. He remembers the passion, and the arguments, and the physical fights that left them both furious. Those silver eyes alive with warmth and full of love as they each said ‘I do’. He remembers Draco. “I can’t just do nothing, Hermione. I loved him, once, and I could no more sit here and let him die than I could you.” His voice has cracked slightly now, and Hermione’s hand is once again tightly holding Harry’s own. 

He continues to sit, long after Hermione (after plying him with water and sandwiches) has left to return to her children, with a promise to return in the morning. His back his aching and his eyes sting with tiredness, but Draco has no one else. And Harry knows exactly how it feels to be alone. So he stays.

Eventually, sheer overwhelming exhaustion forces him to sleep, and he slumbers uncomfortably in his armchair at Draco’s bedside, the rhythmic beeping of the various machines keeping Draco breathing sounding like a tribal tattoo inside his enervated mind. 

*

Over the next few days, Harry continues to perform small, regular and subtle magic to gently improve Draco’s condition. This (combined with a few Confundus Charms when a doctor or nurse became suspicious about the amount of progress Draco was making in such a rapid time) reassures Draco’s medical team that he is making good progress, and his life no longer hangs in the balance. Hermione pays small, regular visits to Harry and Draco, and it is purely down to her that Harry has been eating. 

On the fourth day after Draco’s accident, Hermione bluntly informs Harry that he’s beginning to smell, so Harry does return to his home for a wash, change of clothes, and a proper rest. He showers, then collapses into bed for the first night in god-knows how many, what with him being on nights before Draco’s accident, and falls into a deep sleep which leaves him feeling a million times better by the morning. 

When he arrives back at hospital a couple of hours later, a police officer is waiting for him. To Harry’s relief, the police officer informs Harry that the lorry driver has been released without charge: examinations of the lorry proves that the driver was not speeding, there was no trace of drink or drugs in his system, and both Draco and the still-unidentified man were wearing black clothing, had no reflective clothing of any kind, and were in the middle of the road in the middle of the night in an unlit country road. An inquest will have to be held, although it’s quite obvious now that this was an accidental death. 

Later that day, Draco is taken down for a CT scan, and the results confirm that there is no major spinal cord damage (thanks to Harry’s spellwork). Harry meets with the Charge Nurse and arranges a few days’ holiday from work while Draco is having his scan. Later that day, the doctors decide to try waking Draco from the coma, and begin to withdraw the medications that have been keeping him unconscious. 

Harry, when he isn’t at Draco’s bedside, spends the next couple of days getting his home ready for Draco, for it now looks more and more likely that he’ll be discharged into Harry’s care when the time comes for him to leave hospital. Daphne Nott, née Greengrass, visits, but as Hermione says, she has a newborn, and cannot take Draco in. Pansy Parkinson also pays a visit (timed so perfectly with Harry’s absence it leaves Harry certain that the bitch was hiding, waiting for him to leave), and, whilst the doctors tell Harry that she sobbed and flung herself on Draco dramatically, she made it perfectly plain that he will not be coming to stay with her at all.

“That would simply ruin my plans to spend Easter in Tuscany,” she had said to a nurse whom Harry knew from when they worked together in the A and E department. “No, I’m sorry, but it’s just not possible.” Zabini and Goyle haven’t even bothered to visit. 

Hermione has checked the missing persons record in the Ministry, but no one of the poor dead man’s description is listed. The Muggle police have appealed to the public and conducted their own missing persons search, but again they’ve drawn blanks. Harry thinks that they will have to wait for Draco to wake up and identify him. He tries not to think about some family somewhere, going out of their mind with worry because their son, brother, dad is missing. 

Exactly a week after Draco was first brought into hospital, Harry notices his fingers jerking, and presses the call buzzer for the nurse. She comes in, accompanied by the doctor, and Harry observes as they perform a series of tests to see if Draco is finally waking up. Harry grimaces as Draco responds to pain stimuli, but also knows this is an extremely encouraging sign. He’s itching to help, but manages to stay observing. It’s extremely odd for him to be on this side of hospital life, as a… well, as a relative he supposes, with a grimace. It’s been a very long time since he considered Draco his family. 

The medical staff are encouraged by these signs of waking that Draco is showing, and expect him to wake up soon. When he finally does, however, he manages to catch Harry completely off-guard, who has been dozing lightly in the chair next to Draco’s bed. It’s the strange gagging noise he hears which wakes him, and his eyes shoot to Draco’s bed. His first emotion is overwhelming relief as he sees Draco’s eyes open, but then Harry realises Draco is trying to remove the breathing tube, a look of panic across his clearly confused face. Harry calls for the doctor, then helps Draco remove the tube.

“Shh,” Harry soothes. “It’s alright, Draco. You’re safe.” 

Harry had wondered what he would say to Draco if they ever saw each other again. He is quite certain that this would not have been it. Draco, however, doesn’t seem to have noticed who it is with him, and is very agitated. So Harry does something he didn’t think he’d ever do. He puts his mouth to Draco’s ear and begins to sing, very softly and for Draco’s hearing only, “ _Weasley cannot save a thing,_ _he cannot block a single ring,_ _that's why Slytherins all sing:_ _Weasley is our King._ ”

It works, miraculously, and Draco instantly calms, some part of his brain obviously recognising the song. Only then does Harry realise he’s gripping Draco’s hand. He doesn’t let go.

It takes several more hours for Draco to wake fully from the coma and for the confusion to ebb. Harry is reading when Draco does so, and jumps when he hears Draco’s voice. It sounds hoarse and sore from the breathing tube, and he’s clearly very frightened, but even so there is a hint of an arrogant drawl to it that Harry knows so well as the Malfoy mask, one which Draco uses when he feels threatened.

“What the fucking hell are you doing here?”

Harry’s head snaps up, and even through all the bruising, he can see that Draco is sneering at him, or at least making an attempt to. Good, he thinks. It’s a very positive sign. But Draco isn’t done with his questions. 

“Also, _husband dearest_ , where the fuck is ‘here’? Where am I? What the hell happened to me? And where in the name of Merlin is Christophe?”

  



	3. You Are Nothing to Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Massive apologies for the huge wait between chapters. Real life has been a bitch recently.  
>  The title of this chapter comes from Muse's 'Uno'._
> 
> *
> 
> **You Are Nothing to Me**
> 
> This means nothing to me  
> 'Cause you are nothing to me  
> And it means nothing to me  
> That you blew this away
> 
> 'Cause you could have been number one  
> If you only found the time  
> And you could have ruled the whole world  
> If you had the chance
> 
> You could have been number one  
> And you could have ruled the whole world  
> And we could have had so much fun  
> But you blew it away

“Draco, calm down,” Harry says quickly, as Draco spots the lines in his arms and begins to panic all over again. The medical team is trying to keep him still too, explaining- in terms that Harry knows Draco will have barely any concept of as they’re all Muggle- what happened to him and why he’s in hospital. Instead of calming Draco, the few facts he’s clearly caught the gist of are upsetting him further, so Harry makes a decision. Sod the Statute of Secrecy. He draws his wand, points it at the doctor and two nurses around the bedside, and whispers, “ _Confundo_ ,” three times in quick succession, giving him a few minutes in which to explain things to Draco without raising suspicions amongst his colleagues. He quickly casts _Muffliato_ , and leans forward.

“There was an accident,” Harry explains quickly. “You’re in hospital. A Muggle one. It looks like you Apparated directly in front of an oncoming vehicle, and it hit you. And you were… hurt. Badly. The Muggles brought you here, in a flying vehicle called an air ambulance. These machines and needles that you’re attached to take the place of spells and potions, and I promise you, Draco, it’s vital they stay in place. Please, trust me.”

“Why are you here? How did you find me? And what has happened to Christophe?” Draco says, and Harry can hear the alarm in Draco’s voice. 

Harry takes a deep breath, and glances at his colleagues, who are still blinking confusedly. 

“I’m here because I work here. I’m a nurse, Draco. After we broke up… well, you know I left the magical world. This is what I do now. I didn’t find you- you were brought into the hospital when I was on shift. I was part of the team that saved your life.”

“And Christophe? Where is he?” Draco is trying to sit up to look at the doors, and is clearly terrified. 

“He’s… somewhere else here in the hospital,” Harry says as he soothes Draco back down, and it’s not a lie, exactly; the man Harry now knows is called Christophe is still here. It’s just he’s in the hospital morgue, rather than on another ward. Best that Draco doesn’t know this just yet though, Harry thinks. He’s only been awake half a day, and who knows what the information that Draco’s- what, his boyfriend?- is dead could cause a huge relapse which Harry isn’t prepared to cause. This doesn’t make Harry feel any better about the lie though, especially after asking Draco to trust him. “Draco, what is Christophe’s surname? We’ve not been able to identify him.”

“It’s Lefebvre. He’s from Nantes,” Draco says. “And can’t he tell you his name himself?”

“He’s… not awake,” Harry says, feeling awful. 

“Didn’t _Rennervate_ work? And don’t give me that crap about not using magic in here, when I just watched you cast the Confundus Charm on those three Healers.”

“Doctors. And two of them were actually nurses,” Harry corrects automatically, though he’s not sure why he’s bothering, in all honesty. It’s hardly important information. He avoids answering the rest of Draco’s question. Draco is staring at him uncertainly now. 

“And what is this?” Draco indicates the IV drips which are inserted in the back of his hands. “Is all Muggle medicine this barbaric? Why do they have to insert potions into a person’s actual arm?”

“It’s the quickest way to get the medicine you need into you,” Harry says. “There’s a saline solution in this catheter-” Harry points at the small tube closest to him- “this one’s not connected to anything at the moment but was being used to give you units of blood-” Draco’s already pale face drains of any lingering colour at these words- “and this one here contains antibiotics, which we’re administering to you to prevent anything nasty invading your system and making you even more unwell. This one here,” Harry gestures to the tube which is located in the crook of Draco’s left arm, “contains nutrition, as obviously you’ve been unable to eat for the past few days. Want me to continue with the entire list of medications you’ve been given?”

“Muggle blood?” Draco hisses, and his face is murderous. “You let these… these _people_ put the blood of filthy, common, non-magical Muggles into my body?”

“Yeah, I did,” Harry snaps back. He suddenly feels angry. Comments like this, he reminds himself, are why Harry had walked out on Draco so soon after their wedding. “It was that, or let you die, see. The human body tends not to fare so well once exsanguination has taken place.” 

“Don’t Muggles have Blood Replenishing Potions or something? Are they really that backwards?”

Harry bites his tongue, and the sharp sting from the bite reminds him that Draco is here not as his ignorant ex-husband, but as a patient, and a rather poorly one at that. He wants to point out all the ways that Muggles have advanced and overtaken wizards- technology, electricity, the internet… sod it, even pens that actually contain ink, rather than having to dip the feather of a dead bird into an inkwell, and argue who, exactly, is it that’s backwards? But he doesn’t. Instead he answers Draco’s question, and explains briefly about blood donation and transfusion. Draco looks positively horrified by the whole thing, and Harry wonders if he should have just not mentioned the whole blood thing.

“Couldn’t you at least have given me yours, if you really couldn’t have got a Blood Replenishing Potion? At least yours is magical,” Draco says, once Harry has finished explaining. 

This sentence is so utterly absurd that Harry laughs. It’s been years since he’s held a conversation with someone with next to no knowledge of the world outside his (or her) tiny bubble of wizarding Britain, and he’s obviously forgotten just how ignorant many witches and wizards can be. 

“Besides the fact that you needed more blood than I could have given without rendering myself extremely ill, or dead, our blood type isn’t well-matched,” Harry says, and quickly explains the different blood types to Draco. He bites back another laugh when he explains that Draco, as a patient with AB negative blood, was extremely rare, and thinks he sees Draco’s chest puff with unmerited, arrogant pride, as if having a rare blood type is some sort of coveted achievement.

“So, we’re not compatible,” Harry concludes at the end of his mini biology lesson. Draco’s stare bores into him, those cold, steely-grey eyes that Harry used to lose himself in- usually whilst they were fucking, if he’s honest with himself- softening slightly.

“No,” Draco agrees, and his voice is low. “We’re definitely not compatible.”

Harry swallows hard and finds he can’t tear his eyes from Draco’s. He opens his mouth to speak, but in that moment his Confundus Charm wears off and he is suddenly aware of three medical professionals hurrying around Draco’s bedside, all looking slightly ruffled and bewildered but otherwise completely normal. 

“I’ll check on you later,” Harry says to Draco, forcing his gaze away. He points to the doctor and nurses. “They have work to do now.”

He leaves.

                                                                                               

*

_Harry Summons a rucksack from the top of the wardrobe and begins to shove handfuls of clothing into it, not bothering to fold it in neatly. His hands are still shaking from rage, and there is a strong smell of scorched hair from the hex Draco threw at him just minutes before._

_Draco is not in their bedroom. Harry can hear him cursing, followed by the sounds of shattering glass, down the hallway of their shared penthouse flat, and knows that Draco has just smashed the crystal plaque Harry had commissioned for Draco when he achieved all O grades on his N.E.W.Ts._

_He can’t even remember what their fight was about- not to begin with, anyway. Probably the same thing they fight about every night: Draco’s incapability to be even civil to Hermione or Ron, despite the fact Ron had done nothing to deserve civility of late. Harry’s total disregard for so-called pure-blood ‘traditions’. The article that appeared in the_ DailyProphet _this morning, accusing Harry of yet another affair. The fact that when they’re not fucking they simply have very little in common. He can’t do this anymore, he just can’t._

_He grabs the Marauder’s Map, his Cloak, and his few other prized possessions, which amount to very few to show for his almost twenty-one years, and throws them onto the jumble of clothing in the rucksack. He gives the bedroom a cursory glance; he’ll probably never see this room again. Harry is just so tired of the rows, which are becoming louder, more frequent, and violent. He needs out. Out of this sham of a marriage which he should never have entered into in the first place._

_“Off then?” Draco sneers at him as Harry walks down the hallway. He pauses, wand aimed at his and Harry’s wedding photograph which has been Levitated from its place on the mantelpiece and Draco was obviously about to smash, and cups Harry’s chin in his hand. Harry notices that it is bloody; the smashed crystal has gashed Draco’s flesh. Good, he thinks maliciously. He bats Draco’s hand away._

_“Perfect Potter, Gryffindor paradigm, running away! Who’d have thought it?” Draco says. The tone is cruel and mocking. “You’ll be back. You always are.” He bends his head lower then and pushes his mouth against Harry’s in an almost brutal kiss, which contains no passion or love at all and is simply intended to let Harry know exactly who Draco thinks Harry belongs to. Harry’s not having that. He shoves Draco off his mouth with a growl._

_You are nothing to me anymore,” Harry says. “You lost the right to kiss me weeks ago.”_

_“Which is exactly why you let me fuck you last night, I presume,” Draco drawls, and rage surges through Harry. The bastard still doesn’t believe that Harry really is leaving. Harry just about resists the urge to throw yet another hex at his husband, settling instead for barging him out of the way with his shoulder._

_“Drop dead,” he says, then yanks open their front door. As a final afterthought, he pulls off his platinum wedding band and throws it at Draco, before storming into the hallway, heading for the communal stairs. His neighbours will be glad at least one of them has finally moved out, he thinks. They won’t need to keep putting up Silencing Charms every time he and Draco row. He reaches the ostentatious, gaudy staircase- Draco had chosen the flat, after all- and takes a deep breath. He’s not just walking out on his marriage here. He’s walking out on everything he’s known and found comfort in since the defeat of Voldemort. And he knows that once he steps onto the staircase, there is no going back this time. Harry’s lips are still tingling from the force of Draco’s kiss. This is the last time he will feel this. Harry tries very hard not to cry._

_He leaves._

*

Harry phones Hermione briefly to let her know the latest in Draco’s recovery, before driving home for a quick bath, a change of clothes, and a meal of beans on toast. Not for the first time since Draco woke up is Harry wondering why he’s still visiting; it’s obvious that his spell work saved Draco’s life and he will recover from the injuries he sustained, so why is Harry continuing to visit? He had intended to go back this evening, but he’s so tired, and besides, Harry keeps reminding himself, Draco is not his responsibility. Not anymore. He drags himself to bed, and is asleep in minutes.

He returns to the ward the following morning with a bag of clothes and a few books for Draco, and the first thing he hears after stepping out of the lift is the sound of Draco swearing loudly, from the inside of his room. Quickening his pace, Harry half-walks, half-runs down the corridor to Draco’s room, and swings open the door.

“Get… fuck… off…me!” Draco is panting, as a large male nurse Harry doesn’t recognise is attempting to hold Draco down whilst a much smaller, female nurse Harry thinks is called Stella attempts to change the dressing on Draco’s leg. She is failing miserably; despite the many tubes attached to him, Draco is lashing out and fighting the male nurse, and Harry is quite certain that, any second now, Draco will unleash some kind of wild magic, and then there will be hell to pay. He decides to intervene quickly. 

“What’s going on?” he asks, loudly enough that both nurses and Draco stop their skirmish and turn to the door.

“Mr Malfoy is being very stubborn about having his dressings changed,” says the male nurse, exasperation laced into every syllable. “They’re oozing, and need replacing.”

“In the name of Salazar, get the fuck off me!” Draco cries. “Potter! Help me!”

“’Salazar’?” Stella repeats, her eyebrows furrowed, but Harry is already next to Draco’s bed.

“I want Potter to change them. Not you, not her, _him_ ,” Draco says, then launches again into his frantic outburst. Harry sighs. That was the other thing that royally pissed Harry off throughout their entire relationship: despite being married, for God’s sake, Draco had still insisted on calling him _Potter_. But now is not the time to think about that, Harry reminds himself, as currently Draco is lying agitated in a bed, with oozing leg wounds, two fed up nurses, he keeps shouting out words like ‘Merlin’ and ‘Salazar’ and ‘hex’, and any second now he’s going to make his catheter bag explode, or some other, but no less hideous, incident occur. If changing a couple of blood-stained bandages is what it takes to calm Draco down, _then fine._

“It’s OK,” Harry says, putting down the holdall of things for Draco and grabbing a disposable apron and pair of latex gloves from the sink area. “I’ll do them.” He stares pointedly at the door, and both nurses sigh, but take their leave. Harry turns to Draco.

“Watch what you say,” he warns, as he removes the blankets covering Draco’s legs and reaches for the tray Stella had prepared for the dressing change. “Honestly, Draco, what did you think threatening to hex their eyebrows off was going to achieve?”

“Potter,” Draco says quietly, “there is a tube stuck up my cock.”

“It’s a catheter,” Harry replies, gently peeling the bloody dressing from Draco’s thigh. Draco’s eyes widen, and Harry knows he’s recalling their earlier conversation when he’d explained the catheters in Draco’s hands.

“What potion are those Muggle fools using that needs to go up my cock?” he replies, voice very high-pitched now. Harry has to fight to keep a straight face.

“Different type of catheter, Draco,” Harry says as he cleans the bleeding wound from Draco’s leg. “You can’t, um, get up to visit the loo like this, so it collects urine. Look.” He gestures to a large, half-full bag of piss. Draco flushes. Harry smirks. 

Five minutes later, Harry has cleaned the wounds and replaced the dressings on Draco’s legs. 

“They could have done that for you, you know,” Harry says, as he fills the information in on Draco’s patient chart. “The other two nurses, I mean. They’re as qualified as I am.”

“I’m not having Muggles touching me,” Draco snaps. Harry is about to yell back at this, probably to call him a pure-blood elitist fuckface, or something else completely unprofessional to say when you’re a trained nurse and the person you’re saying it to nearly died a few days ago, when he notices something else in Draco’s face besides the haughtiness that Draco is trying to portray: fear. Harry could kick himself. Here Draco is, in a Muggle hospital bed which is as alien to him as St Mungo’s would be to the other patients in this hospital, alone with strangers and being subjected to completely unfamiliar hospital procedures, all the while not knowing what has happened to his boyfriend, or to himself properly. It may have been years since Harry has had to deal with Draco and his moods, but they’ve known each other now for nearly a quarter of a century. Harry should know what Draco’s self-defence mechanism looks like by now. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, and he means it, too. He should have been here this morning after all. “I’ll make sure I’m here when you need personal care, OK? And I’ll try and do as much of it as I can myself. But, Draco, there are certain things I’m not going to be able to do, and you have to let the doctors take care of you. They’re trying to make you better.”

Harry is putting all the soiled dressings into a bag when he hears Draco speak once more.

“When are you going to tell me Christophe is dead?”

Harry stills, and looks Draco in the eye. He’s not going to deny it, because, really, that would be all kinds of shitty to do that.

“How did you know?”

Draco makes a noise which harry thinks sounds like, “Harumph”. 

“I suspected he was the minute I asked you about him when I woke up. You avoided my eye and wouldn’t answer my question properly. You always were dreadful at concealing information. It’s why you made such a bad Auror.”

Harry lets the jibe go. Now isn’t the time for a row.

“He was brought in the same time as you, but his injuries were more severe. He passed away only minutes after you both arrived in the hospital. I’m so sorry, Draco.”

Then, to Harry’s utter astonishment, Draco’s face cracks into a huge, genuine smile.

“Oh thank Merlin for that,” he exclaims, a look of enormous relief spreading across his still-bruised and cut face. “He’s gone. He’s actually, finally gone. I’m finally free of the bastard.”

                                                                                               

*

Harry returns to his home that night feeling exhausted and utterly confused. He throws the takeaway curry he bought on his way back onto a plate, grabs a bottle of Hobgoblin from the fridge, and puts _EastEnders_ on the telly. But not even Bianca Butcher’s insane and far-too-loud shrieking at one of her horde of children can distract him from what Draco had told him just an hour previously. 

Harry had assumed, for obvious reasons, that Christophe Lefebvre had been Draco’s boyfriend. 

He’d been wrong. Very, very wrong. 

Deciding after a while that he needed to talk to someone, and by ‘someone’ he clearly meant ‘Hermione’, Harry grabs his mobile, scrolls through his contacts until he finds Hermione’s number, and presses call. As usual, Hermione answers on the fourth ring.

“ _Hello? Harry, everything OK_?”

“Hi, Hermione,” Harry says, through a mouthful of Dhansak, “could you pop over for a bit? I need to talk to you about that man Draco came into hospital with.”

“ _Sure_ ,” Hermione’s voice replies. “ _Give me ten minutes to finish off putting the girls to bed, and I’ll Apparate over._ ”

By the time she arrives, Harry’s finished his curry and has a large pot of proper coffee brewing in his coffee maker. He hears the small pop of Apparition in his spare bedroom, then her voice call out, “Harry?”

“In the kitchen,” he calls back, pouring two large mugs of coffee, adding milk to both, then a spoonful of sugar to his own, leaving Hermione’s without. Hermione walk into the kitchen, gives Harry a confused smile, then slides into a kitchen chair, taking the steaming mug of coffee from Harry’s offering hands. 

“Daniel’s not happy,” Hermione says after taking a sip of coffee. “He wanted to go and watch the Champions League quarter-final in the pub tonight. But I told him you’re more important than football, and he’d just have to stay home with Amy and Ellie and watch it on Sky instead.”

“Thanks.” Harry gives Hermione a small smile. “So, Draco knows that Christophe Lefebvre is dead. He’s known ever since he woke up, apparently.”

“Oh dear. How did he take it?”

Harry takes a deep breath. “Euphoric relief, is probably the closest I can come to explaining it.” The flabbergasted expression on Hermione’s face is almost comical. Harry thinks he probably would have laughed if the topic wasn’t so serious. 

“Hermione,” he begins, “did you know that Draco was working as an Unspeakable?”

“I’d heard rumours,” Hermione says, blowing onto her coffee. “But you must remember what that department is like; no one knows anything. They keep information about who works down there a tight-lipped secret.”

“Yeah, well, apparently the Department of Mysteries was working on some huge project that involved international magic- I don’t know exactly what, Draco wouldn’t tell me- and the British Ministry transferred Christophe Lefebvre and about twelve other Unspeakables from all over Europe and Asia over to work on it. Anyway, this was all about six years ago, in 2008. The project finished up in 2010, and all the Unspeakables returned home, except for Lefebvre, who had apparently taken a shine to Draco.”

He pauses then, taking a big sip of coffee. Hermione, predictably, is hanging on Harry’s every word, her brown eyes wide and alert. 

“Lefebvre wouldn’t take no for an answer, according to Draco. He convinced their supervisor to take him on at the Ministry permanently, and he left France and moved to London. He even bought a house on the same street at Draco’s. 

“He kept sending gifts, apparently. Small things, but enough to make himself a complete nuisance- a box of chocolates from Honeydukes here, a bottle of Ogden’s Firewhisky there. That sort of thing. Draco returned everything unopened. This went on for nearly a year. Then one night he and a few other Unspeakables were working late when Draco reached out for a glass of water, and took a swig. The next thing he knows, or can remember, anyway, he’s flat on his back in his own bed and Lefebvre is having sex with him.”

Harry has to stop here and control himself, for he can feel his magic begin to flare up. He takes a few deep breaths to calm himself, and they work to an extent, but he can still feel the rage boiling close to the surface of his skin. 

“Bastard had slipped him Amortentia. Draco said he was always so careful not to eat or drink anything he’d not kept a complete watch over, but it was late and they’d been working for seventeen hours straight. He let his guard down, and Lefebvre took full advantage of it. This went on until last summer.”

Hermione claps her hands over her mouth in horror. 

“It’s Merope Gaunt all over again,” she says in a quiet voice through slightly trembling fingers. “Oh my god.”

“Let’s just be glad they obviously couldn’t have a child,” Harry replies. He doesn’t even want to think about the possibility of what could have happened if two men could conceive together. It might have meant another Voldemort. It’s exactly these sort of fucked-up situations that makes Harry glad of his decision to return to the Muggle world. “Of course, after the initial dose, it’s much easier to keep slipping it to your victim, and Christophe Lefebvre managed to control Draco with it for eighteen months.”

“And none of Draco’s so-called friends thought it was suspicious that he’d fallen into a relationship with the man who had stalked him for over a year?” Hermione says. “That’s just simply awful. What sort of people are they?” She has turned rather pale now, and affection for his oldest and best friend floods Harry. Hermione and Draco have never got on, but she can find compassion in her to be horrified at the situation. Harry thinks that she may just be the most wonderful person on the planet. 

“You said it yourself, Hermione,” Harry says sadly, “his friends just don’t care enough. They’re all far too absorbed in their own lives to spare any time for Draco, who they never completely forgave for marrying me.”

“So what happened last summer then?” Hermione asks. “How did Draco break free?”

“Some top-secret bloody Unspeakable thing again,” Harry says. “Again, I don’t know the full story, but Draco says he was sent into isolation for a couple of weeks, despite Lefebvre’s frantic protests, and the potion began to wear off. When he emerged from it he realised what Lefebvre had done, and he tried to flee. But Lefebvre wouldn’t let him go.”

“Why didn’t he go to the Aurors?” Hermione says. Harry notices her coffee is sitting absently on the table, completely forgotten about now. 

“Why would they have cared? Amortentia isn’t illegal, although god only knows why. And besides, Draco didn’t have a lot of faith in the Aurors, not after how they treated his mother after the war.”

Harry remembers clearly how Narcissa Malfoy was thrown into Azkaban for three months after the fall of Voldemort, awaiting her trial, despite Harry’s protests. He was the one who had worked the hardest to secure her release from the place, arguing that she had never taken the Dark Mark, and had indeed saved Harry’s life in the Battle of Hogwarts. It was during this time that he and Draco put their past animosity behind them and began to work together. And it was also during this time that Harry realised Draco might not be quite the massive arsehole he’d always thought he was. 

“Draco tried to run. He sold his house in London and moved back to Malfoy Manor, which was warded. He quit his job. He was seriously thinking about moving abroad. Then about two months ago, Lefebvre managed to breach the Manor’s wards. He didn’t even bother with Amortentia this time. He simply Imperiused Draco instead.”

Hermione looks like she wants to be sick. Harry can’t say he blames her.

“Luckily, Draco has a strong mind and was resisting the Imperius Curse. He’d almost managed to throw it off entirely when he made an attempt to escape. Lefebvre noticed, and he and Draco got into a physical fight. Draco turned on the spot to Apparate, pulled Lefebvre into it on an unintentional Side-Along, and ended up miles away from where he’d planned in the middle of that road with an effing lorry hurtling towards them.” He pauses then to drink the last remains of his mug of coffee. He’s not sure whether he should voice his next thought aloud. But, fuck it, he’s angry, so why not. 

“Christophe Lefebvre is extremely lucky he is already dead. Because if I got my hands on him, I’d rip him to pieces.”

“Harry.” Hermione’s voice is soft, and gentle, and all too _knowing_ , as she places her hand over his. “It’s been ages- years, really- since I’ve seen you this upset over something. Seeing Draco again after all these years… it’s not, well, reignited feelings, has it?”

“He means nothing to me,” Harry says. “Not like that, not in that way, anyway. I’m just so… so furious that he was treated like that, that’s all.” He shuts up then, as Hermione is giving him one of her Looks. 

“So, when is Draco being discharged?” she asks, tactfully changing the subject. 

“Week or so. Maybe two. I’m still casting charms, but I’m keeping them subtle. Nothing too drastic or altering,” Harry says. “I think he’s going to have to come here as he won’t be ready to live alone, but after what he’s been through with Lefebvre, that is probably for the best anyway. He’s rather upset about the whole thing, as you can imagine.”

“Just be careful, Harry,” Hermione says, her voice carrying a heavy warning. “I don’t want to see you with your heart broken again.”

                                                                                               

*

It’s another ten days before the doctors decide that Draco is well enough to be discharged into Harry’s care. 

“Absolutely not,” Draco protests, when he’s informed he will have to stay at Harry’s house for the foreseeable future. “Did you miss the part where I mentioned he is my ex-husband? Emphasis on ex?”

“Mr Malfoy,” says the doctor in charge of his care, and really, Harry thinks this woman must have the patience of a saint, given Draco’s behaviour over the past week and a half, “as there is no legal separation between yourself and Harry, he remains your next of kin. If you refuse to be discharged into his care, which is your right, then we must make arrangements for you to be cared by Social Services, as there is no other person to whom we can hand your care over.” Draco looks blankly at this, and Harry asks for a minute alone with Draco, during which time he explains what Social Services are, and how strangers will have to provide all his basic care, without the added benefit of Harry’s healing charms, all the while whist Draco lives in shared Muggle accommodation where he may not even have his own bedroom. It’s clearly obvious from the horrified expression on Draco’s face that this will not be happening. When the doctor returns, Draco, unsurprisingly, agrees to leave the hospital with Harry. 

“As soon as I’m better, we’re going to end this farce of a marriage properly,” Draco snarls, as Harry helps him into his trousers. 

“Fine. Now shut up for thirty bloody seconds,” Harry bites back. He ignores the painful knot that forms in his stomach at Draco’s words. 

“I mean it, Potter. We’re going to get divorced, I’m going to get a new wand, then I’m out of here. I’m thinking of Sweden, or maybe Japan. A new start.”

“Could you just call me Harry? Is it really that difficult?”

“Shut up, Potter.”

Harry pushes Draco harder than he probably should into the wheelchair, then, after signing lots of paperwork, he collects Draco’s bag and a bunch of outpatient appointments, wheels him out of the ward and pushes the button for the lift. While they’re waiting for it Draco launches into a tirade of criticism, complaining about everything from the food, to the cleanliness of this room, to, “That nurse who had pink hair and looked like a sodding clown”, and back to the fact that he was going to have to live with Harry again “After I thought I’d finally got you out of my life for good.” Harry surreptitiously draws his wand and casts a Silencing Charm over Draco. Draco glares back in earnest. 

Ten minutes later, Harry has Draco safely strapped into the front passenger seat of his car, the wheelchair and Draco’s hospital bag is in the boot, and Harry is ready to leave. He’s removed the Silencing Charm from Draco, but is very close to putting it back on again. 

“…think for a second I want to ride in this tin pot vehicle with you driving it? Why can’t we Apparate?”

Harry takes several slow, deep breaths and counts backwards from ten. In German. Then he puts the key in the ignition, switches on the engine, and pulls away from the hospital, to begin what, Harry hopes, isn’t one of the biggest mistakes of his life.


End file.
